Angela. I love what you left behind. Your scent, melony, yet sharp and immaculate as yogurt. Your diaphragm, placed, according to the promise, in my nightstand drawer as a token of fidelity. And the pearls. The pearls.

In the shady northeast corner of the park, where vines have overcome the water fountains, and evergreens grow, rangy and unkempt as in the depths of Vronsky Forest, I came upon two children doing something very naughty. I had wandered to this most rustic corner of the Common seeking quietude and relief from the dogs recently permitted by a foolish ordinance to run free without leashes in the park. 

The years have put a lid on it, the principals passed into oblivion. I think I can now, in good conscience, reveal the facts surrounding one of the most secretive and spectacular love affairs of our time: 

It’s a bad day for all the niggers in the classroom. We don’t really give a good rat’s ass where the hell the Great Salt Lake is, so Purvis sticks it just outside of New Rochelle. And Densil think that 6 x 8 is the height of the power forward for the New York Knickerbockers, which is why they ain’t worth shit either, not even worth the Boston Celtics. 

It all started with the house, which looks a bit like a bird about to fly off the dune. Three levels, all almost entirely glass, jut out at angles to each other and to the beach so that every room has a view of the Atlantic. Behind the dune and the f house, off its own separate walk, is a storage shed that has no glass at all. 

I can’t really remember how I met Tommy. I recollect him first as a smooth cloche of shiny light brown hair sporting the slender plume of a cowlick, a head bent over a book in study hall belonging to someone I’d heard was captain of the tennis team, leader of the Crowd and Sally’s steady; then, without transition, he was my friend and he was struggling to explain to me his theory about Sartre’s Nausea as we kicked our way through autumn leaves. 

Jack liked his office and it was all right to like your office. He would say that basically it worked. It was nicely enigmatic. All the tools of his trade, his papers and portfolios, were kept out of sight in a block of chrome-plated file cabinets with unlabelled drawers. 

I realize of course that I’m no longer worthy of the name musician, if I ever was, though officially I’m still registered as a specially-funded pianoforte soloist with Segismundo Alegría and the Vienna Philharmonic for the duration of the Estabrook Festival, Summer 1978. 

There was a time when courtesy and winning ways went out of style, when it was good to be bad, when you cultivated decadence like a taste. We were all dangerous characters then. We wore torn-up leather jackets, slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue and ether and what somebody claimed was cocaine.